5 Most Annoying Fails in Marketing If you're doing any of these, your marketing team needs to be revised!
By Rustam Singh
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Marketers - the ones that bridge the gap between a great product/service and convincing the public to accept it – often come up with great creative methods to advertise and promote their work. Sometimes, they may be assigned the difficult task of creating the need for such a product/service to exist in the first place. But ever so often, in the chase to match unrealistic expectations from the management or the market, marketers try fierce competitive techniques to gain attention to their brand. These may often fail miserably and help develop and instructive hatred towards the brands, possibly forever. The most common source of such fails is spam, which unfortunately comes in colorful forms today.
Businesses undeniably risk developing a permanent negative association with their brand, if they spam their consumers or the general public. Let's face it – no product or service in today's startup world is absolutely unique anymore, and if they are, it's only a matter of time before rival companies' spring-up with exact clones of the same. In such an open market of competition, consumers need just one point differentials to switch brands.
(Image source: pixabay)
Here are some of those that tick-off consumers to switch brands which you should completely avoid at all costs:
SMS marketing
One of the most ancient relics of the past and fiercely marked by the honorable Supreme Court of India to be illegal, if engaged by anyone to spam users, SMS marketing is still living in the last decade because for some odd reason it still exists. I unfortunately utilized the services of Zomato one time over a year ago– but I still get around 3 texts a day reminding me how there's like 10 rupees off if I buy a meal worth a week's pay. Such spam soaked annoyance is the surest way to make sure you never get service on your platform.
Marketing calls
Despite subscribing to the national Do Not Disturb service (DND,) which makes it mandatory to not share my contact details with any marketing company, it's not rare to get odd calls about loans, cheap property on sale or general surveys. While I'm not alone, such calls invariably end-up with an annoyed cuss word or two and an instant hang-up – useless to both consumers as well as startups.
Uncalled feedback requests
Understand a simple fact; today's consumer values their privacy and time way more than any other thing. Begging them for feedback isn't a great way to ensure that you are trying to improve your services. If someone is genuinely impressed, they will automatically rate you or leave valuable feedback on the app review page or via a private message to your other social media pages.. Alternatively, if there's something bad, they will go out of their way to complain. Repeatedly asking for feedback is bad marketing and can affect you negatively in the long run!
Emails about discounts and services
Okay, so you cleverly disgusted the option to be included in mailing list when users first used your services on your website/app in a way that everyone accidently ends-up clicking yes to it. But check in the statistics, how many users actually use your services because of that email? Or do users just end-up deleting the email and one fine day when they access their inbox on a free day, unsubscribe from your email list? I bet it would be a tough job to count those numbers; such is the volume and ratio of such users.
Unnecessary updates
Exploiting the fact that any new change would show up as an "update" in the section of their Google Play store or Apple Store, developers often add negligible changes to apps and re-launch it as a new version, just to make users feel- they have got something better!. In theory, repeatedly reminding the user of your app's existence would help get more active users. Practically, users can just look up changes in the same log and use their intelligence whether to update or not. For example, if you just write "icon change", nobody in their right frame of mind will waste time and data to update that 80 MB app.
Have you been annoyed by such annoying spam in your daily life? Let us know in the comments on our official Facebook page Entrepreneur India
